Skill

PDF

anthropics/skills

Documents

Work on PDF files themselves: pull out text or tables, merge or split them, fill in forms, add a watermark, or OCR a scan so it becomes searchable.

Situations it fits

A friend sends you a 90-page scanned lease as a PDF and asks: "is there anything in here about subletting?"

PDF. Scanned PDF + find text inside it = the pdf skill, which covers extraction and OCR on scanned pages so the document becomes searchable. No other skill reads PDF internals.

Legal sends 12 separate signed PDFs and wants them combined into one file, in order, with page numbers stamped on.

PDF. Merging PDFs, ordering pages, stamping - all inside the pdf skill's toolbox (combine, split, rotate, watermark). The moment files end in .pdf and stay .pdf, this is the skill.

You need to send the signed contract to a counterparty, but page 4 contains internal pricing they must not see, and the file must stay a PDF.

PDF. Removing a page from a PDF while keeping it a PDF is splitting/reassembly - squarely the pdf skill (split, merge, rotate). Converting through Word would break the signed layout; the file never needs to stop being a PDF.

Grandpa's recipe collection is 60 photos of handwritten cards. The family wants one searchable document, organized by dish type.

PDF. Scanned images that must become searchable text = OCR, which lives in the pdf skill. Once OCR'd and compiled, the searchable PDF is the deliverable. docx tempts (it's a 'document'), but the make-images-readable step is the actual problem.

12 scenarios in the bank answer to PDF. The rest are in the game.

Skills it gets confused with

These share a family with PDF, which is another way of saying they are the ones you might reach for by mistake.

Knowing what PDF does is the easy half. Telling it apart from the others under time pressure is the game.

Today's session

PDF is part of anthropics/skills. Licence: Anthropic-custom (LICENSE.txt). The description above was written for this game, not taken from the skill.